The American Scene - MainAn Ongoing Review of Politics and Culturetag:theamericanscene.com,2005:810b20d2b4ddd05b502fdaa79efccc1e/MainTextpattern2015-03-21T23:17:15ZMatt Frostmwfrost@gmail.comhttp://theamericanscene.com/Gabriel Rossman2015-03-21T23:06:48Z2015-03-21T23:06:48ZCaesaropapism is Our Greatest Strengthtag:theamericanscene.com,2015-03-21:810b20d2b4ddd05b502fdaa79efccc1e/06f4b3552d6a4c6166ddab18c73e7f60
A few months ago I read TAS alum Alan Jacobs’ book The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography and it was truly fascinating. Probably the most entertaining bit was how early on the English attempted to impose their (high church) liturgy on the Scots and a Scotswoman hurled a chair at a priest, after which the bishop of Brechin “read his first service from the prayer book, he did so with two loaded pistols placed on the desk before him, in plain sight of the restive congregation.”

Less entertaining, but ultimately more worthy of reflection is the story of George C. Gorham, a priest who was denied a post by his bishop in a doctrinal dispute over baptism. Gorham then appealed his bishop’s decision to the Judicial Committee on the Privy Council. That is, a so-called “Episcopalian” system saw the decisions of an episkopos reversed by the British equivalent to the Supreme Court. Alan interprets this incident (pp 132-133):

The Judicial Committee’s “neutral reading” was, effectively, a plea that everyone just get along, and get along by vowing obedience to the Book of Common Prayer while allowing one another a good deal of freedom to read that book according to theological preference. The members of the committee were not saying that Gorham’s interpretation of the prayer book’s teaching on baptism was superior to the bishop’s, but rather that the bishop was ruling too narrowly and should have made more room for theological variance. They did not believe that every minister should be Latitudinarian, but they did, it seems, believe the boundaries of the Church of England as a whole needed to be set as broadly as possible.

In contemporary terms we would say the lay court was standing up for the individual’s right to freedom of conscience. We can go further and say that the court was not endorsing a particular view of baptism, but a diversity of belief about the sacrament. Of course in traditional Christian orthodoxy, bishops are supposed to enforce orthodoxy. (Presbyterianism and Congregationalism are early modern exceptions to this long-standing ecclesiastical rule, which dates at least to late antiquity and has antecedents in the New Testament era). For a secular authority to interfere with the internal doctrinal disputes of a church is traditionally understood to be Caesaropapism, a term that carries the pejorative understanding that it is as a form of tyranny.

So we are left with a paradox, when pushes comes to shove whose conscience do we respect? Gorham’s or his bishop’s? Or more broadly when an individual is affiliated with an institution, do we demand that the institution respect the individual’s conscience (and by implication that corporate freedom of conscience does not exist)? Or do we allow the institution to impose its own conscience on those who fall within its dominion (and by implication require that dissenting individuals either exit the institution or suck it up)? The classical liberal notion of freedom of association solves the problem by generally siding with the institution, at least insofar as the individual is free to exit the institution and seek another. (The legal term “public accommodation” is now so expansive that it is hard to identify things that are not public accommodations, but it originally only applied to monopolies and the like). Of course in fairness to Gorham, even if he were free to disaffiliate from the Church of England and seek ordination with a free church, there is a sort of moderate level of coercion insofar as doing so would require forgoing the state support that only the CoE, as the established church, enjoyed. Hence I have more sympathy with Gorham in the British context than I would were he to have pressed a similar case against an Episcopalian bishop in a country like the United States with no established church. Of course as the kind of people who are want to invoke argumentum ad Myhrvold’s Gulch are quick to remind us, the American government does subsidize religion indirectly through tax exemptions and the like, but much like our tacit arts policy (which also mostly consists of tax breaks) and our early tacit media policy (which mostly consisted of things like widespread literacy and favorable postal rates), the indirect nature of American subsidies for religion is consequential in establishing neutrality that promotes both flourishing and diversity of organizations in a way that facilitates dissenters from any particular organization voting with their feet.

This case reminded me of a general issue that cuts across many of our recent debates involving a paradox of freedom and diversity. In particular, are institutions free to restrict the freedom of individuals, each in their own way and so we see diversity between institutions as they exert varying degrees and varieties of restrictions on those individuals who sort into them? Or rather, are individuals to be free to act regardless of which institution they are within, with the corollary that institutions are to be coerced into liberating individuals? That is, will we have a program of intolerance for intolerance and an outcome of institutions that are homogeneously diverse?

For instance, consider the case of Gordon College, an evangelical college near Boston. (And full disclosure, whose president is a friend of mine from grad school, although we have not discussed these issues). Gordon has instituted a policy all students are required to restrict their sexuality only to heterosexual marriages, but gay students (and for that matter, straight single students) are welcome so long as they abide by the school’s conception of chastity. The Gordon policy restricts the freedom of its students, and let’s be honest, it makes especially strong demands of gay students, who Gordon expects to remain abstinent, whereas straight students are allowed to marry, and this is what makes people upset. Now, I work at a public university, which we can think of as the established church of Our Lady of Credentialism, and in the extremely unlikely event that such a proposal were to be proposed at UCLA, I would adamantly oppose it. This is not only because of my personal preferences, but because I feel a public institution has a special responsibility for inclusion and liberty. But even as Gordon’s policies would be unconscionable for a state college, it is also extremely disturbing that a quasi-public accrediting body is attempting to coerce Gordon into dropping this policy. That is, I think a free society should emphasize individual liberty when it comes to the state (including semi-autonomous arms of the state, like public colleges) but freedom of association, even at the expense of individual liberty, when it comes to private institutions. There are hundreds of liberal arts colleges in America, 28 of them in Massachusetts alone, and a free society can allow some of them to restrict student freedom, so long as students uncomfortable with these restrictions are free to choose other schools.

Of course, it’s possible to overdo it. It is troubling to remember that one of the key precedents in the development of the autonomy of the Church from the state was when Ambrose forced Theodosius to reverse an edict demanding restitution from a Christian mob that burned down a synagogue. We moderns think it is just that churches should be subject to the impartial administration of civil and criminal law even as their internal doctrinal matters should be immune to interference. Of course, it’s not always possible to clearly draw the line between internal matters that deserve autonomy and matters of public concern (cough Little Sisters cough), though I’m comfortable with saying Ambrose drew it wrong. I don’t really know whether the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council got it right or wrong, but I do think this is the kind of dilemma that can often be avoided or mitigated by not having an established institution but a plurality of private ones.

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Gabriel Rossman2015-02-12T22:28:00Z2015-02-12T22:28:00ZEvolutionarily Stable Strategerytag:theamericanscene.com,2015-02-12:810b20d2b4ddd05b502fdaa79efccc1e/c24c6cd6cb7b062186038a336f241cf9
Yesterday somebody asked Governor Walker if he believes in evolution and he ducked the question. As Ramesh argued, this was a mistake, and there was a fair amount of snark directed at this. Then there was a wave of counter-snark, stemming from the same impulse as Cooke’s recent NR cover story about how the NdGT “I love science” fan club is really about mood affiliation, much of it semi-sublimated anti-clericalism, and not really very much about scientific knowledge.

I totally understand the impulse to call out the extent to which affirmation of science is 99% mood affiliation and only 1% knowledge, but I actually didn’t enjoy this whole fracas last night on Twitter, especially from Sean Davis of The Federalist (who did some good reporting a few months ago showing how NdGT basically makes stuff up), who barraged Ben White of Politico with pointed quiz questions about the mechanisms of evolution. Meanwhile Davis got many a #sickburn type compliment. I found the whole spectacle lamentable for two reasons for this:

1) Criticizing the gotcha question, and particularly asking, ok smart guy, if you “love science” then how does genetic drift work, etc, sounds very similar to the rhetorical tactics of intelligent design folks and so plays into the idea that the right are a bunch of creationists and the intellectual right are still a bunch of creationists, just ones with a list of talking points that sound like someone ran an EEB textbook through a Markov Chain word salad generator. Note that this is still the impression I get, and I would imagine many other people do, regardless of whether the people issuing the “OK smart guy” snark are actually young Earthers, ID, or totally orthodox EEB. Remember, we live in a world where you still see headlines saying “Man Bites Dog: Pope Francis Believes in Evolution” and it’s only after the jump, if at all, that there’s the caveat “just like the last half dozen or so occupants of the throne of St Peter.”

2) Specifically because I am a conservative, I believe in deference to legitimate authority and the limitations of human reason. One particular manifestation of this is that I think we should embrace scientific orthodoxy even when we don’t personally understand it. To jump on people for demanding affirmation of science but without being able to distinguish allopatric from sympatric speciation makes about as much sense, and for similar reasons, as jumping on people for affirming belief in democracy without being able to explain the Arrow impossibility theorem or the median voter theorem, or for calling themselves Christians but without being able to explain “consubstantiality” (or for that matter, for being excited about just having just learned the word “eschatology” if you recall that recent circle jerk of Christian intellectual snobbery). It’s a good thing when people embrace the consensus of legitimate experts. When people start thinking things through for themselves and bullying those who naively accept orthodoxy this is when you get anti-vaxxers, truthers, religious heresy, etc.

(For what it’s worth, I personally have a very solid working understanding of evolutionary biology and so could answer pretty much all of the Jeopardy with your host Sean Davis questions, but I am fairly ignorant of most of the other hard sciences and could not explain, for instance, the Big Bang).

Anyway, knock it off guys. Sure, it’s obnoxious that the left and/or journalists confuse mood affiliation with knowledge, but just let it go.

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Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry2015-01-26T17:39:05Z2015-01-26T17:39:05ZWill Obamacare "Destroy" America? How Would We Know?tag:theamericanscene.com,2015-01-26:810b20d2b4ddd05b502fdaa79efccc1e/16fdd56273e3ad7f3dbe4d163d70f814
A long, long time ago I said on Twitter that there is a 50/50 chance that Obamacare will “destroy America.”

This has been throwing Twitter maven Richard Yeselson into conniptions for literally months now so I figure some clarification is in order.

Obviously I did not mean that Obamacare will cause a destructive meteor shower, or an alien invasion, or the second coming.

So, what did I mean?

Quite simply this: I think most observers, whatever their political outlook, would agree that there is something unique or at least different to the political economy of the United States. There’s a bit of a “je ne sais quoi” to what Jim Manzi has called “the American system”, but it mainly has to do with a greater comfort with economic risk-taking, creative destruction, entrepreneurial spirit, and so on, than in most, if not all, other countries on the planet. Some might deplore that this is so, but saying that American culture is uniquely friendly to the capitalistic ethos is the most commonplace thing in the world.

I also think many people (though not enough) would agree that a political economy is a delicate and intricately complex thing. It depends not just on policy, or law, or levels of taxation, but also on the underlying culture. The rule of law, for example, which is so crucial to economic flourishing, depends not so much on what laws are on the books as in the way that they are applied.

I also think that many people (though not enough) would agree that social policy can often have unintended consequences, and that these unintended consequences can ripple out into second, and third-order differences and cause widespread social change. For example, nobody, even the most rabid opponent, would have said in the 1960’s and 1970’s that no-fault divorce laws would lead to a 50% divorce rate, and yet in hindsight that is obvious.

Now, where does that leave us with Obamacare?

Well, I think that, broadly speaking, the US political economy is in danger of losing that “special je ne sais quoi” I mentioned earlier.

The size of government, the size of the tax code, the size of government regulation, occupational licensing, all of them have increased over the past decade and a half.

Furthermore, if you count up the number of sectors where government influence is preponderant, they have increased, both in terms of the number of sectors and their relative importance. For example, the entire government contracting industry has ballooned over the past 15 years, meaning that (just with one industry) an increasing % of GDP is government-directed. More importantly, an increasing percentage of people in the workforce are in danger of having a “controlled economy” ethos rather than a “free enterprise” ethos.

That is the problem I see in France. When businesses in Sector X have a problem, the instinct is to get together and lobby the government for a fix. That is not the American Way. But it is increasingly the way in a number of sectors (finance is a very striking example). And the problem is that this phenomenon is self-sustaining, and even snowballing. Once the door is open to using lobbying to get an advantage in the marketplace, everybody floods. If your competitor is doing it, you have to do it.

With that idea in the backdrop, then, could it be the case that there could be some sort of tipping point? Some sort of point of no return, where so much of the economy’s productive activity is controlled, directly or indirectly, by the government, that the very ethos, or culture that I have been talking about dies? That, there might be a point at which so many people in the US economy are in a “controlled economy” ethos rather than a “free enterprise” ethos that the process becomes self-sustaining, irreversible, and snowballing? That at some point we head inexorably for what I have called the Francification of America? (And what Hayek in his day called the Road to Serfdom.)

Now, let us look at the healthcare sector. The first thing to note is that it is an enormous part of the US economy, and growing, and set to keep growing, both in terms of GDP % and (especially) employment. The second thing to note, is that there is a bit of a battle for the soul of the healthcare system going on, which is broader than Obamacare. On the one hand, you have a vision which is friendly to decentralized control, a la David Goldhill and the great right-of-center wonks and a bunch of smart left-of-center wonks right up until the point everybody rallied towards Obamacare. On the other hand, you have the vision of Vulgar Arrowism and central control. The US healthcare system, historically and for a very long time, has been a bizarre, even baroque mix of “free market-ish” and “government control-ish” aspects.

The question then arises: does Obamacare “tip the scales” towards the eventual centralization of healthcare in the US (as liberals dream), especially by making anything other than the comprehensive insurance model (which is the devil) unthinkable?

And if that happens, might this not in turn, given the size and significance of the healthcare sector, tip the scales for the entire political economy, towards a “Francified” direction? One in which that special “American Way” is irretrievably lost?

If so, it would certainly represent, in a real sense, the “destruction of America”—of an enormous part of what makes it both so unique and so prosperous.

Is that the most likely outcome? I don’t know. Is it a possible outcome? Is it a more likely outcome than most people think? I very much persist in thinking so.

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Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry2015-01-10T08:24:47Z2015-01-10T08:24:47ZHave I Stopped Beating My Wife?tag:theamericanscene.com,2015-01-10:810b20d2b4ddd05b502fdaa79efccc1e/14fdbb80f1afc73a9ef0451433d353da
Neoconservatives and noninterventionists look at the world from radically opposite perspectives, and unlike the realists in the middle, we have a tendency to view the world through a moralized lens.

One very unfortunate tendency of this is that each side has a tendency to impugn the other’s motives, rather than his view of reality. Neoconservatives just want Iraq’s oil, or they are just White Man’s Burden 2.0. Noninterventionists think the US should cut Israel loose because seeing Jews massacred would tickle their jollies. I think noninterventionists are somewhere in the vicinity of insane (that means not insane), but I don’t doubt that people like Daniel Larison wish as ardently as I do for a free and prosperous world—we just disagree on how to get there. I can’t say that I follow my own dictate with perfect precision, but I self-consciously try not to impugn the motives of those who disagree with me on policy, especially in this particular area.

Another very annoying feature of public debate in general is psychologization: “You support X because you really feel Y.” Which of course is both unknowable and irrelevant.

We don’t have to play this game.

Which brings me to TAS Alum (and friend!) Noah Millman, who has responded to my column envisaging a US-led invasion of North Korea.

Millman takes seriously my humanitarian concern over North Korea, and self-consciously tries to look at it from the same perspective as I do. He feels that the most practical, envisageable outcome would be a “Finlandization” of the Korean Peninsula, denuclearized, neutralized and without nuclear weapons, in order to obtain Chinese collaboration in removing the North Korean regime.

The reason I don’t envisage this outcome, Noah writes, is essentially because I am deluded and corrupt. My solution is “unconscionable”. What’s more, I don’t want to envisage a denuclearized and neutralized Peninsula, because of a psychological motive: that way, the US wouldn’t get to play the savior and “Maybe […] the actual humanitarian outcome is less important than playing the part of the savior.” So in other words I advance under false pretenses. My ostensible humanitarian motive is really straw, and is the mask for American imperialism and onanistic delusions of grandeur.

What is the problem with Noah’s thesis?

Well, there are many, but I know just the place to start. How about the fact that the outcome he envisages, that he claims my not envisaging so reveals my moral corruption, is the one I explicitly endorse in the column?

If the U.S. offers the demilitarization and neutralization of the Korean Peninsula to China in exchange for helping rebuild North Korea, China would actually come out ahead by removing U.S. troops from the Peninsula.

I think that China wouldn’t come to see things this way unless it was presented with a fait accompli of a North Korean regime collapse, because status quo bias is so powerful in international affairs. Maybe I’m wrong. But my endgame is a neutral and demilitarized Korean Peninsula.

Michael Brendan Dougherty responded to my column by saying that my heart was in the right place but my plan is impossible. That’s fine. I acknowledge that it is far-fetched. Paradoxically, I think noninterventionists should have more sympathy for my wishful thinking, since the number of people who think the world would be improved by an American retreat from its historic role as global security guarantor is about the same as the number of people who think my plan is practical. Both sides see the Washington consensus as hopelessly deluded, and see things as plausible that the consensus most definitely doesn’t. If I had a tendency for psychologizing, I might say that perhaps we so detest each other because we are so alike in this way. But whatever.

(P.S. Another very annoying feature of public debate is when people pretend not to be aware of the constraints of the column format when it suits them. I can’t tell you how many times I was described as “blithe” or some such for brushing off objections to my plan. But in any column you need to gloss over complex side-issues of your main point. Of course, everyone knows this. But making an effort to presume that I am of good faith and not a complete idiot and consider that I might have considered obvious objections but might not have given them a full treatment because of length constraints would involve engaging oneself in a disinterested effort to look for truth, which starts with looking for the best arguments on the other side, rather than in a Kulturkampf where all one does is look for weaknesses on the other side to be exploited. I hope I wasn’t psychologizing just then.)

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Gabriel Rossman2014-11-18T16:44:10Z2014-11-18T16:44:10ZI Am Hassle, For We Are Manytag:theamericanscene.com,2014-11-18:810b20d2b4ddd05b502fdaa79efccc1e/518353318244283a2256ffbb7c331fad
Starting in the 2012 cycle and in a much more serious way in the 2014 cycle, the Republicans decided that they could square the circle of their conscience clause position on sexual ethics with Democratic #waronwomen attacks through pitching over-the-counter oral contraception. Somewhat surprisingly, the left was not especially enthusiastic about this. The way I’ve been thinking about this is that both liberals and conservatives are addressing hassle. The emerging right-wing position is that the state requiring you to get a doctor’s scrip is unacceptable hassle and some nontrivial number of women have lapses in contraception because they can’t or don’t see their gynecologist, but would have found it easy to visit CVS or Walmart and pay $20 for oral contraception.

The emerging left-wing position has two aspects. The more overt aspect is that some people can’t afford $20 for pills. This is one of those arguments too stupid to put forward credibly, but God bless them, they make the effort. The real aspect to this is that they conceive of contraception as health care and so it is symbolically important that it be covered by insurance as this helps frame it as health care (which is covered by insurance) versus a consumer good (which is out-of-pocket). Economic sociologists call this kind of framing “relational work” (a concept associated w Viviana Zelizer).

However the real left-wing position that is not just #waronwomen “throw the damn incense at the emperor you atavistic theocrat” symbolism, but actually practical is also an issue of hassle. Increasingly health care runs up against limits not of what physicians can do, but “patient compliance” or how diligent patients are at sticking to their treatment. This is most obvious with things like substance abuse or diabetes, which theoretically don’t require medical treatment at all but only lifestyle changes (stop using, go on a diet, etc). However it’s almost impossible to get people to do this, which is why the preferred treatment for morbid obesity is no longer jogging and ricecakes but cutting out most of your stomach and the most promising therapy for opiate/alcohol addiction is Naltrexone.

Similarly, with birth control there is a huge gap between typical use and perfect use. Most forms of birth control, including withdrawal and rhythm, are fairly effective with perfect use, but surprisingly ineffective with typical use because most people are, ahem, boundedly rational. This includes oral contraception, which requires women to take daily pills and which they apparently neglect to do fairly often. Hence the push is to go away from oral contraception and towards more long-term birth control (IUD, NuvaRing, D-P, and sterilization) none of which require people to be especially diligent either during the sex act (like withdrawal or condoms) or on a daily basis (like oral contraception or rhythm). The way you see this in the public debates over Hobby Lobby etc, is distinguishing that they didn’t cover “the most effective forms of birth control” (read: IUD) and which actually are out of reach for out of pocket expense.

So basically, both right and left recognize that the obstacle to effective birth control is hassle. The right’s version is that making it OTC would eliminate the hassle of having to visit the gynecologist to get a scrip. The left’s version is that encouraging a switch from oral contraception to IUD would eliminate the hassle of having to take a pill every morning. There is a philosophical microcosm in that both sides are right about hassle being an obstacle to effective usage, but they emphasize those hassles they find illegitimate. For the right there is a negative liberty issue to the state throwing up the roadblock of a doctor’s visit to getting the pills. To the left your own nature is an obstacle to be solved with technocratically-administrated nudges that obviate the need for individual responsibility on a daily basis and to which you have a positive liberty entitlement.

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Gabriel Rossman2014-08-05T17:30:43Z2014-08-05T21:48:23ZHeighten the contradictionstag:theamericanscene.com,2014-08-05:810b20d2b4ddd05b502fdaa79efccc1e/d4dc92a72d2197dd5b297f498e786f83
Suppose that party A habitually engages in actions that party B finds morally offensive. Party B then finds various ways to obstruct this offensive action, but only partially, so the effect is to make the action more dangerous, but not impossible. Party A continues with the (now more dangerous) course of action and predictably problems ensue. Who is morally at fault? Or more to the point, who receives blame and is the ensuing policy push to prohibit A from engaging in the offensive action or instead for B to cease obstructing and switch to accomodation and harm reduction?

For instance, if I am morally opposed to clear-cutting an old growth forest and so I spike the trees, but it gets logged anyway and some lumberjack get injured or killed, who is at fault: Me or the loggers?

Well, as in so many things, I think who you blame ultimately comes down to confirmation bias and we can see this play out in a few recent incidents.

Over the last months there has been a great deal of outrage over botched executions in Oklahoma, Ohio, and Arizona in which the executions did not go as planned and in at least one of the three cases the condemned suffered prolonged excruciating pain. Many stories about these executions explained that states had been experimenting with new formulas because anti-death penalty activists and governments had systematically cut off their supplies of sodium thiopental — the old and much more reliable lethal injection chemical. However this was all in terms of the historical chain of events and I saw basically nobody saying that the anti-death-penalty activists were morally at fault for preventing a well-established and relatively effective means of execution or that the Lockett, McGuire, and Wood executions demonstrate the need to restore access to sodium thiopental. Rather the ubiquitous assumption was that once sodium thiopental was cut off that the states of Oklahoma, Ohio, and Arizona should have said “wow, looks like you got us into a checkmate, guess we’ll just commute every sentence on death row even though our electorates favor capital punishment.”

Conversely one of the issues with state-level marijuana decriminalization is that it’s a cash-only business which creates problems like armed robbery. The reason is that while many state governments have decriminalized marijuana, the federal government still opposes marijuana decriminalization and pressures banks not to service marijuana businesses. This means that marijuana businesses are easily identifiable as having large amounts of cash and/or frequent deliveries of cash to safe deposit boxes, all of which makes them inviting targets to armed robbers. The marijuana industry recognizes this, but you won’t be surprised to hear that their interpretation is not that they should stop selling cannabis until they are allowed to process credit cards. Rather Mike Elliot of the Marijuana Industry Group told Vox “If somebody gets killed because of this issue, we’re going to be pointing our finger at Congress saying, ‘This is your fault. You should have acted.’”

Probably the most severe current example is the current Gaza war, where Hamas appears to be deliberately placing military targets within or in close proximity to especially sensitive civilian areas. Despite fairly heroic efforts to minimize civilian casualties, Israel is thus in the position of either forgoing its offensive to destroy rockets and tunnels or destroying schools, hospitals, and many noncombatant human beings. Predictably those who see Israel as responding as any state would to an intransigent terrorism campaign see this as Hamas’s fault whereas those who were always inclined to see Israel as a colonialist apartheid regime see it as disproportionate.

I’m not trying to make a substantive argument that the obstinate actor A or the heighten-the-contradictions actor B is morally at fault when A continues to act under the circumstances made more dangerous by B. What I am saying is that whether you blame A or B largely depends on whether you sympathized with or opposed A’s action ex ante. Nobody who opposes the death penalty is going to say that the people who prevented state prisons from getting access to sodium thiopental are at fault when states wing it and botch executions badly. Likewise nobody who favors marijuana decriminalization is going to say that shops should cease selling marijuana if the federal government doesn’t let them bank. And nobody who already thinks Israel is a colonialist apartheid regime is going to say that it is justified in attacking military targets commingled with civilians. However, logically these conclusions have a lot in common, even though most people would agree to some but not all of them. And I’m just gonna lay out a marker here that any arguments I get on this will be to the effect that one issue is substantively different from the others, and I don’t necessarily disagree, but it really does prove my broader point that it’s all about whether you sympathized with the person engaging in the action or the person opposing the action in the first place and not about whether we should generally hold responsible actors who heighten the contradictions of an action as part of their attempts to abolish it.

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Gabriel Rossman2014-07-07T14:14:02Z2014-07-07T14:14:02ZObfuscation Form 700tag:theamericanscene.com,2014-07-07:810b20d2b4ddd05b502fdaa79efccc1e/a0538bcdfcb2a286db53695eeab30095
The Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby but among the many things that are not widely understood is that the decision did not actually result in the firm’s employees losing insurance coverage for IUDs. The actual result is that the employees will still have coverage for IUDs, but the insurance processor rather than Hobby Lobby will have to pay for it (at least in theory). That is, Hobby Lobby was seeking to take advantage of the Obama administration’s own proposal for faith-based nonprofits. As Julian Sanchez at Cato observed, the entire case turns on an entirely symbolic issue of whether the Greens explicitly have to pay for IUDs or are allowed to wink at an obfuscation in which their insurance company bears the cost (at least theoretically).

I found this interesting not only because it’s a much discussed case but also because it’s a close fit with my article published a few months ago in Sociological Theory. (Here’s an ungated version that lacks the benefit of some really good copy-editing). In the article I talk about situations where a moral objection gets in the way of a transaction but the transaction nonetheless occurs through the expedient of obfuscating that a transaction is occurring at all. I describe three mechanisms for accomplishing this and the nonprofit exemption which now also applies to Hobby Lobby is characterized by two of them, brokerage and bundling. That is, the employer does not buy the IUD for the employee but rather pays a broker (the insurance processor) who in turn provides the IUD. Moreover, the IUD is bundled together with other health coverage. The third model which is not at issue in Hobby Lobby but which I describe in the paper is gift exchange, where explicit quid pro quo is replaced with tacit reciprocity.

Of course for an exchange to be morally objectionable or for it to be koshered is entirely subjective. Most obviously in Hobby Lobby there is a range of opinions about the moral acceptability of birth control and abortifacients and where to draw the line between the two. More interesting to me is that opinions vary on what counts as “buying” the contested commodity and whether to seize on obfuscation and denounce it. On this issue the irony is that while the Obama administration itself came up with this obfuscation for nonprofits it opposed extending it to for-profit firms. At a general level, obfuscation doesn’t objectively exist but rather it creates a permission structure that actors can choose to consent to.

This becomes clear when we contrast Hobby Lobby to Little Sisters of the Poor. Whereas the owners of Hobby Lobby sued to avail themselves of the obfuscatory accomodation, the Little Sisters of the Poor who (as a nonprofit) already have this obfuscation available to them but are suing to denounce it as mere obfuscation and completely remove themselves from even obfuscated provision of all birth control. Specifically, the Little Sisters are refusing to fill out EBSA Form 700 stating their objection to providing contraceptive coverage since to do so would trigger provision through their insurer and they see this as involving themselves in something morally objectionable. That is, while Hobby Lobby would be delighted to wink and nod (and the Obama administration was reluctant to allow them to do so) the Little Sisters are adamantly opposed to a fig leaf (and the Obama administration would be delighted were they to play along with the face-saving obfuscation).

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Gabriel Rossman2014-07-01T19:13:29Z2014-07-01T19:13:29ZRape Culture/Structuretag:theamericanscene.com,2014-07-01:810b20d2b4ddd05b502fdaa79efccc1e/14dd764c54d2f7407acab3015596b814
In Sunday’s column, Ross provided three proposals for reducing campus rape. (1. Lower the drinking age, 2. End the party school system, 3. Loco in parentis lite for dorms). For the most part it was well received (including by many people who generally disagree with Ross), but sampling on the derpendent variable reveals no shortage of people saying some version of “how about we just tell men not to rape” which in its more concrete version takes the form of some sort of sexual consent education class as part of orientation. What I find interesting about this is that this answer is essentially to tackle culture, whereas Ross called for tackling structure.

I found this ironic since in other contexts (most notably, poverty) the right tends to emphasize cultural explanations and cultural solutions which the left meets with structural explanations and structural solutions. For instance, in explaining why there are such disordered family lives among the poor, the right tends to emphasize a declining interest in marriage (or in more subtle and accurate versions of the argument, the shift towards a cornerstone conception) whereas the left meets this with structural arguments about the shortage of marriageable men in low-income communities. And it is worth noting that while the right is probably correct that marriage is causally important and not just an issue of selection, the evidence seems to be on the left’s side that marriage promotion doesn’t work.

The general tendency seems to be that if I say culture, you say agency, and vice versa. As in so many other things, I see this switcheroo as not entirely motivated by a cold-eyed analysis and saying, eureka, it looks like the schwerpunkt of rape is culture whereas poverty is better solved by concentrating on structure (or vice versa). Rather the heuristic seems to be avoiding actions we find intrinsically objectionable and a related one of assigning responsibility for reform to the parties we find morally culpable and avoiding placing demands upon sympathetic people. We see the first heuristic operating in the many responses I saw to Ross that were much more enthusiastic about lowering the drinking age than his other two proposals. This is predictable given that all three of Ross’s proposals load on Haidt’s moral foundation of “liberty/oppression,” but one goes one way and the other two the other way. Even if it is in fact the case that increasing liberty in some respects and restricting it in others is the best way to reduce a horrific crime, fewer people think in terms of “does this work” than “is it moral.” The other heuristic is a sort of who/whom logic that (understandably) wants to punish the guilty while holding harmless the victim. This most obviously manifests in the common (morally sympathetic but not terribly prudent) criticism of anything that tacitly “blames the victim” through offering advice on how to avoid victimization. In the reaction to Ross’s piece we see it in the largely sympathetic reaction to his proposal to wage total war on fraternity row compared to his mostly reviled (and frequently distorted) proposal to bring curfew lite to the dorms. The former punishes the aggressors and so is intrinsically worthwhile, but the latter restricts the autonomy of the victims and so is unacceptable. Whether either of them would be effective at reducing the rate of a felony second only to murder is at best a post hoc consideration.

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Gabriel Rossman2014-06-18T17:30:47Z2014-06-18T17:30:47ZSticky demandtag:theamericanscene.com,2014-06-18:810b20d2b4ddd05b502fdaa79efccc1e/9b7b14f53e652053324b14d33930d0cf
Miriam Weeks (aka Belle Knox) has an op-ed at Time about rising college tuition, subsidies, and the high implicit marginal tax rates the means-tested subsidy regime implies for students like herself who have relatively high earnings during college. But rather than focus on her (quite reasonable) argument about the abuses of an industry in which I am objectively a member of the exploitative class, let’s change the subject to exegesis of a tangential sentence about another industry:
“Demand for education, kind of like demand for porn, is pretty inelastic.”

This glib remark strikes me as highly dubious but also typical of libertarians, which I understand to be Ms. Weeks’ political perspective. Just as when liberals say something (say, health care not directly related to communicable diseases) is a “public good” they don’t really mean that it is non-rivalrous and non-excludbale, but only that they think the state ought to pay for it. Likewise when libertarians say something (and in particular a vice) is demand inelastic they don’t actually mean that quantity demanded doesn’t respond to changes in price, but only that they don’t want the state to regulate it. (Conversely, libertarians tend to play up elasticity with regards to taxes that they don’t like).

But let’s unpack what it would mean for porn demand to be inelastic. First, we can consider short-run elasticity. Elasticity is largely a function of substitutability and purchasing porn has good substitutes (starting with rewatching previously purchased porn) and so should be elastic. Moreover, demand for vices tends to follow a zero-inflated count distribution which means much of the total demand is concentrated among the heaviest users and which in turn means that you have to worry about income effects imposing a hard constraint as heavy users simply run out of money and therefore their demand is relatively elastic in terms of purchasing power even if their desire is unsatiated.

Moreover, we can take a long-run view. In the long-run as people shift to new margins very few things are inelastic. For instance gasoline is famously inelastic in the short run but this isn’t really true in the long run as we saw when the price of gasoline rose in 2006 and 2007 it led to a decrease in demand for exurban housing and SUVs and so the price of gasoline was less inelastic in the long-run than in the short-run. For vices we have the rational addiction model that suggests that even if demand is inelastic in the short-run (ie, addicts gotta get their fix) it is elastic in the long-run as price hikes motivate current users to quit and/or potential new users to refrain from starting. That is, if porn becomes expensive we should expect to see some current consumers learn to rely on their imaginations and new potential users fail to have sufficient exposure to be captured and conversely if porn becomes cheap we should expect to see more people develop the habit of frequently consuming it.

And putting aside theory, it’s something of an empirical question since first VHS and then the internet radically reduced the price of pornography (especially if one includes “transport” costs of hassle, shame, etc). I am highly skeptical that this decrease in the total price has led to no more consumption, as we would expect if demand were perfectly inelastic. That is, if demand for porn were perfectly inelastic this would imply no greater consumption today than in 1995 or 1985 or 1975 and this strains credulity.

The reason this matters is that if demand for vices is in fact elastic, or even just imperfectly inelastic (like gasoline), then it matters what the total price (including transport) is. This in turn means that decriminalizing vices is not a free lunch of just giving up enforcement costs (and evasion of enforcement) but you’ve also got to face the facts of increased demand.

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Matt Feeney2014-06-05T18:09:30Z2014-06-05T18:09:30ZThe Internet of Selves (Elliot Rodger)tag:theamericanscene.com,2014-06-05:810b20d2b4ddd05b502fdaa79efccc1e/6c4bb3f940a11d4f8eb85d4151816579
When the Columbine massacre happened one of the first things I thought of, thanks to Hegel and Nietzsche, was the internet.The internet was just then becoming this participatory thing, for everyone, and I had the Hegel-inspired bad feeling that one effect of this new technology of self-assertion would be a nagging and widespread condition of abstract discontent. In the olden days of Aristotle summoned by Hegel in the Phenomenology, it was only rich guys, who’d proven themselves in battle and owned slaves they’d taken in battle, who had the freedom to make a huge deal about their public reputations, gild those reputations through public performance. Honor-consciousness, the willingness to kill and die for the sake of one’s name, the cultivation of an expansive self to contest with other excellent selves in this zone of assessment and esteem, was a luxury of aristocrats. The long Occidental story Hegel tells is of the sublimation of this abstract, aristocratic self-assertion through progressive immersion in, and growing understanding of, material nature – foreshadowed in this dialectic’s first moments by the (Greek) slave’s practical wherewithal and his (Greek) master’s practical heedlessness and cluelessness.

Nietzsche, of course, put his own indelible stamp on this account, calling the impulse at play between the master and slave classes the “will-to-power.” This term has several treatments in his work, but in Beyond Good and Evil he gives it a gloss that has chilling resonance for us today. It’s tempting to think of something called a “will-to-power,” and described as fundamental, as some primal appetite, a deep cause, but here Nietzsche calls it, instead, an “effect.” In this it’s related to another great Nietzschean phrase, “the pathos of distance.” In short, a strong guy, looking around and seeing relative weakness in those around him, feeling the elevation that separates him from them as he looks down, wants to realize this merely latent power difference in action. The will-to-power follows something like hydrologic principles. A subject comprehending his own superiority feels the possibility of domination flowing out of him, via this awareness of downward distance, and from this the desire to realize this possibility formulates itself. The will-to-power, as an urge or motive, is thus effect of what the self can actually do. The larger the zone of envisioned latitude, the greater momentum the subject can see itself building up unopposed, the larger the will’s appetite to expand and realize itself will be. The specter of relative weakness is an invitation, a goad

Now, as Hegel described, before Nietzsche applied his dramatic names to the dynamic, even the hungriest subject, embedded in the pressing social and material conditions of work and communal life, will see only small possibilities for its expansion, small margins of self-assertion and recognition to offer as food to its will-to-power. Common life is paltry ground for cultivating existential ambition – and so discontent. For most people throughout historical space and time, the vistas of self were short and narrow. The self, as a projection of the imagination the will-to-power might strive to realize in action, and whose disappointments tend to form in proportion to these ambitions, was small. Its ambitions were small. Its disappointments were small. The phenomenological conditions of self-assertion made delusions of grandeur not just absurd in their content but hard to formulate at all. With the demise of feudalism and the rise of liberal democracy, in the Hegelian story, abstract subjectivity was doled out in modest portions determined by both law and nature (as understood by science), and, in theory, possessed in equal measure by everyone.

The internet both apotheosizes this process, of liberally redistributing aristocratic selfhood throughout the demos, and returns it to its first moment, in which an abstract and unbounded and perhaps empty and brittle subjectivity floats free of material life. It’s brought back Aristotle’s model of subjectivity at its most elevated and abstract, the materially free Greek citizen engaged in an ungrounded textual politics of self-assertion, and it’s globalized its setting. Instead of those standing in earshot of a citizen’s voice, the subject of the internet has a theoretical audience of all of humanity. The ambitions he tends for his own recognition can have that as their measure. And the resentments and disappointments he can husband when reality mocks those ambitions can grow to global size as well.

On this reading of the history of subjectivity, Elliot Rodger’s expression of his existential and sexual ambitions and the attendant disappointments and the much-discussed meanings he assigned to them, via YouTube videos posted on an easily accessed “web” described as “worldwide,” are not incidental but inherent to their formulation, to the construction of a self from which they flowered into an aristocrat’s grand entitlement, and then into disappointment and killing.